"Lenovo Y510p" doesn't actually tell us what (networking-) hardware you actually ended up with, but the output of "lspci -knn" and "lsusb" should tell so.

Ethernet: At least the first few spec sheets didn't tell anything about this topic, neither if it's present at all, nor which type it is. Most ethernet cards don't (hard-)depend on firmware images, so chances are good that ethernet should 'just work™' - but there are some that do and won't work without the proper firmware being present. If your ethernet chipset is very new, it might also require a kernel version newer than the one provided on the last release ISO (but that can be installed afterwards).

wlan: The spec sheets suggest that this is intel wireless (several types are possible), this one will definately require a firmware image, e.g http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/f/firmware-nonfree/firmware-iwlwifi_0.40_all.deb, depending on the exact chipset variant it might also profit from upgrading the kernel to its current version.
Regarding wlan it's also possibly that there's 'just' the rfkill subsystem interfering, "rfkill list" (as root) will tell about this.

Both of these cases are probably easily fixed, but what actually needs to be done depends on the exact hardware you've got (and that's what "lspci -knn" will tell).

The string 1969:10a1 is the interesting one. The first number is the vendor ID, the second one the device ID. With this info You get quite some results on Google.

Fun fact: these numbers are hardware identifiers, so any OS on PC (and other) hardware will give You these numbers to make Your searches precise (under Windows You get these numbers on the details tabs of the device manager).

I did not dig further into the problem, because I wanted to post this quickly, but I got this link for You:

As samspade mentioned already, your onboard ethernet card uses a Qualcomm-Atheros 'Attansic' AR8172 chipset, unfortunately Qualcomm-Atheros wasn't very interested in supporting these new chipsets in the mainline kernel, so it took way too long before it could be supported. While I did backport alx to our 3.9-6.slh.3-* kernel, it came too late for 3.9-0.slh.4-* in our Ἑσπερίδες release; upgrading the kernel to the current version will fix this.

The good news, your wlan card -IWL2230- is supported since kernel 3.2, which is accordingly supported in our Ἑσπερίδες release already. Given that the required firmware is non-free (and therefore not provided by default in aptosid), you'll need to supply it manually.

The easiest course of action is now to download http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/non-free/f/firmware-nonfree/firmware-iwlwifi_0.40_all.deb (be away that the version number of this package might change one day, breaking the link above) manually and to push it on a USB stick or one of the partitions you're not planning to use for aptosid (so for example the preinstalled windows partition). Now just boot into the live aptosid environment, locate the already downloaded "firmware-iwlwifi_0.40_all.deb" and install it via "sudo dpkg -i firmware-iwlwifi_0.40_all.deb", once this is done, the wlan card should work properly and can be configured via "Ceni" from the Internet menu. If it doesn't, it might help to reload the iwlwifi module ("sudo modprobe -r iwlwifi ; modprobe iwlwifi"), but as iwlwifi is supposed to be a well behaved module and not attempt to load the firmware before ifup, this shouldn't be necessary. You can do this step before or after installing, whatever is more convenient for you.

Once you have a network available, any network, so using the wlan interface this way is the easiest option, you can dist-upgrade the installed system as usual - and with the upgrade, and the new kernel accompanying it, your wired ethernet will start working as well.

If you don't have access to any wlan network and have to (solely) rely on ethernet instead, you'll have to upgrade the kernel manually, which is only possible after installing aptosid to the harddisk/ SSD. For this to work, you can download the current kernel from http://aptosid.com/debian/pool/main/l/linux-aptosid/, which would be "linux-image-3.13-0.slh.3-aptosid-686_3.13-3_i386.deb" or "linux-image-3.13-0.slh.3-aptosid-amd64_3.13-3_amd64.deb" at this moment, but these will be updated relatively soon. After rebooting into the new kernel, your ethernet card should work fine.

Both approaches will be successful, but I suggest the much easier wlan option, as there's less of a chance for problems.

Thank you so much for all your effort. I must say it doesn't look good. I accessed all the sites you mentioned and tried to come up to speed on what they were saying.

I am somewhat confused, though about using a .deb file. If I had to rank my Linux skills on the basis of 10=excellent and 4-5=poor, then I my rank is about 7.5. That's why, in my original post, I indicated that I burned a dvd with the most recent aptosid 2013-01 iso image which is available from the main aptosid splash page is based on a Linux 3.9 kernel.

In your post you mention a the file http://aptosid.com/debian/pool/main/l/l ... amd64.deb. But, I need an aptosid iso image that is based on the 3.13 kernel. Because of my somewhat limited Linux skills, I need the latest Linux kernel as an iso image so that I can install aptosid by strickly following the steps outlined in aptosid manual.

I want a dual boot machine with Windows 8/aptosid. Trust me, I have no love of Windows, but I don't want to overwrite the entire hard drive.

I am not sure how to use the .deb file you mentioned after booting the dvd live iso distribution. Let's say for the sake of argument, there were both ethernet and wireless drivers available. In addition, I needed to use the linux-image-3.13-0. How would I do this within the dual-boot idea. My workstation is fully aptosid and currently using the 3.13 kernel with latest updates. I would very much like that for my laptop.

3) The ceni command seemd to want the directory "/run/fll/ifup" I created the directory under /run, and all was well.

4) I could not make a wireless network connection, although it was trying to do so. The wireless works under Windows 8, because that is what I am using. I will keep trying though. The signal from the router is weak, and to tell the truth, I have always had problems at hotels/conferences with wireless on sidux. Any hints here would really be appreciated.

Thanks so much for your help. And let me say this, I have been using the aptosid distribution for years, and there's nothing like it out there. It really great. Sometimes I think I am a little over my abilities with it, but I wouldn't change it for anything.

Can I do what you suggest with the wireless and getting working with the live dvd iso without YET doing the install to the hard drive.

You can install the firmware required for your wlan on the live system (might need modprobe dance, but not more), you can't upgrade the kernel on the live system (needed for ethernet).

1) o.k., as I mentioned this modprobe dance might be required.

2) make sure that rfkill switches are in the correct position, but if rfkill unblock avoids the issue, it's fine as well.

3) this should not happen and might be slightly suspect, but let's debug this step by step (further down in this post).

4) Sensitivity shouldn't be different between operating systems, at least not between vendor supported drivers whose developers have access to hardware documentation (which is the case for Intel and Qualcomm-Atheros, less so for different chipset vendors). The readings for signal quality (~= 'number of bars') or noise floor however are a bogus and deeply flawed metric, there are no common calibration methods and vendors actively do 'cosmetics' on these metrics as they see fit. What is, or at least should be, comparable are range and effective throughput (not which wireless rate the the driver has determined, but how long it actually takes to transmit a large file) at the same distance/ orientation.

Now to debug this issue further, I recommend to reboot freshly (reinstall firmware, do the modprobe dance, use rfkill as needed) and then to approach this slightly differently.

Code:

$ su
# ip link set wlan0 up
# iw dev wlan0 scan

This should show the list of access points nearby, if it shows up empty, try to get a little closer to a known working access point transmitting at channel 1-11 (channel 12 and 13 might be affected by regulatory domain incompatibilities, so they're not perfect for debugging uses). If neither of these attempts list any access point, please check "dmesg" for wlan related error messages (particularly firmware related or regdom ones, feel free to post the relevant dmesg output after the modprobe dance here) and also check "iw list" as root, which should show the capabilities of your wlan card and the enabled channel mask.

Once "iw dev wlan0 scan" shows the access point you want to connect to, the wlan card is basically working and we can try to connect and/ or debug it on a higher level. Ceni now is a useful method to configure wlan0 and to enter your access credentials. If this doesn't succeed or lead to a useful wlan connection, at least at short range, you can use wpa_cli (as root) to get further details; useful commands are status, scan, scan_results and quit in this shell. Leaving wpa_cli running will also display incoming events from your wlan card, eventual connects and disconnects, so its output is pretty interesting. Given that further debugging depends a lot on the results you achieve up to this point, I'll avoid getting ahead of myself and prefer to respond to the results you'll come up with.

As a general note, debugging might be easier on the installed system, where you can update the kernel (by hand, as explained previously), install the firmware and reboot without undoing previous steps. Your ethernet, Qualcomm-Atheros 'Attansic' AR8172, will then work for sure (I briefly had access to an affected device using that chipset a few months ago), your wlan should work (although I can't test it myself).

rossi

Post subject: Live DVD Boots OK but No Network Available Posted: 30.01.2014, 21:37

Joined: 2010-09-13
Posts: 35
Location: New York City
Status: Offline

Dear slh:

I have followed your instructions in your previous message and have attached the relevant files.

Post subject: Live DVD Boots OK but No Network Available Posted: 30.01.2014, 21:48

Joined: 2010-09-13
Posts: 35
Location: New York City
Status: Offline

Dear slh:

I apologize for the last incomplete post. I pressed the wrong button too soon.

All the files are now attached here.

Quote:

As a general note, debugging might be easier on the installed system, where you can update the kernel (by hand, as explained previously), install the firmware and reboot without undoing previous steps. Your ethernet, Qualcomm-Atheros 'Attansic' AR8172, will then work for sure (I briefly had access to an affected device using that chipset a few months ago), your wlan should work (although I can't test it myself).

I am not sure how to do this. I wanted to follow the instructions given in the aptosid manual by installing from from the iso distribution. For example, how can I be sure the dual-boot would work this way. For example, I would need grub2 to work properly.

So basically installing the firmware succeeded and you're on the radio, in a very noisy environment, as the wireless scan confirms. Now what's interesting, is that you're stuck in a loop between auth and deauthentification because of "reason 15" (which is 4way handshake timeout), which is also confirmed by watching wpa_cli's output. Why this actually fails is a bit harder to determine, without going into the depth of packet inspection. It may simple be a bug in the 3.9 based release kernel, it may be a bigger interoperability issue between that particular access point and your wlan card (or its linux driver), it may be firmware hickups in a crowded environment.

If you can (re-)configure the access point, it would make sense to check what happens if you switch it to WPA2PSK/ AES (CCMP), as WPA1 is technically not specified for 802.11n operations.

Another worthwhile attempt would be to reload iwlwifi with slightly differently module parameters, at least for debugging:

Code:

modprobe -r iwlwifi
modprobe iwlwifi swcrypto=1 11n_disable=0

(it may only need one of those parameters, but using both won't harm)

Of course, testing the current 3.13 kernel on an installed system might already lead to more success.

Coming back to your original question, yes you can install aptosid completely offline without any network connection available. Once installed, you can upgrade the kernel by hand (as explained above using dpkg -i) and you will at the very least gain ethernet support for your AR8172, with a chance that wlan will suddenly start working as well.